Chop Chop (24 page)

R
acist Dave thinks I have used the word
personally
too many times and the word
gash
not nearly enough. He says he would have put in less of the love bollocks and maybe more of his cooking triumphs instead, like when he did 130 covers by himself on the Sunday after our first trip to Mr. Michael's, still so spannered that he couldn't talk, or more about how he saved the croquembouche and less about how poor diddums's hand got burned afterward. He is still sore about my buzzing around the story and wishes I possessed a more constant, focused mind. He is generally appalled by the literary allusions and claims he has been misquoted on a number of occasions. He would like to clarify that he was merely stating the opinions of others when he said, “The fucking Pakis are coming through the Channel Tunnel,” in chapter 3. Dave is also of the opinion that this whole story would have worked better as a musical, with a nice chorus line of waitresses, a big Pavarotti-type tenor as Bob and perhaps a choreographed dance sequence based around a Saturday night service. I respect Dave's opinion but he does not know what he is talking about.

No doubt he will consider this blather as well, but there is an interesting coda to the story of my father. A week or so after the stabbing I came across Glen rooting around in a bin at the corner of the high street and Camden Road. His thin, shambling frame was bent forward at right angles, and with his bony arms he worked the rubbish over, as a swimmer treads water, every so often raising his dark and tilting head to draw breath. Though his heavy overcoat
and filthy shoes bore all the hallmarks of long struggle, his eyes were bright and keen. Winter had not diminished him.

It was early and I was not due to start work until eleven. And so, partly in honor of Ramilov, who had always treated the man respectfully, and partly in honor of Harmony, whose act of charity outside my window that night had made such an impression, I asked Glen if he wanted some breakfast. He did, and promptly ordered four bacon sandwiches and five cups of tea as soon as we sat down in the greasy spoon. I was happy to feed him for a little closure. What had really happened, I wanted to know, between him and One-Eyed Bruce that day?

Glen, between mouthfuls, said he did not have a clue what I was on about.

I realized my fictions had got ahead of me. One-Eyed Bruce was my name for him. I rephrased the question.

“The Rasta with the white eye. You were having a fight about apples in the street.”

“Oh, him,” Glen said without interest. “You mean Neil.”

Neil?
My mortal enemy of the last eight months, the adversary who woke each morning with the intention of bathing in my blood, my sworn tormentor, was called Neil? The world buckled a little under the weight of this new information. There was no One-Eyed Bruce, just as there was surely no Rosemary Baby or Charming Man or The Last Lehman Brother. The supporting characters in my story threatened to float clean away. If they left, what then? Racist Dave, Mr. Michael and The Fat Man would all expect proper names, and Darik, Shahram, Dibden and Ramilov too. And I would not be able to get away with calling myself Monocle any longer, and would have to use my real name. The thought of it was too appalling to consider. So I did the only reasonable thing: I ignored what Glen had said.

“What happened?” I asked again.

“Trying to steal my apples, wasn't he?” said Glen. “Too crooked to steal his own.”

“I saw that,” I told him, remembering how my father had come running out of the bookie's to join the fracas. “There was another man in the fight too, wasn't there?”

“Oh, yeah,” said Glen. “I thought he was after my apples too”—he wrapped his long piano player fingers into a fist around the bread and bacon—“but the next day he came up to me in the street and gave me something worth quite a bit, said I should buy myself some more apples.”

This was a shock to me. A revelation. My father, with his bent pound shop spoons and his “If you want me to leave you'll have to pay me” attitude, responsible for this act of grace? It was supernatural. But perhaps, I thought, I had read my father wrong. Perhaps he was as capable of goodness as anyone else, his heel-like qualities notwithstanding. As Ramilov had proved, the great acts of charity were not always where you would think of looking. And even though the apples in question had been stolen, it was still a noble gesture. He had fought for the little man, and with that apple money he had helped him survive the cold hard winter. Those apples had sustained Glen. A bright bushel of health amid the Camden canker, they had kept him going. Alone, the gesture did not excuse my father's conduct of the last fifteen years. Yet it opened up an avenue of possibility. It made my father a candidate for redemption.

“And did you?” I asked, almost choking with happiness.

“Did I what?” said Glen.

“Did you buy more apples with the money?”

“Fuck no,” said Glen. “I spent it on booze.”

“Ah.”

“Yeah,” Glen added, “thirty quid I got for that silver swan. The man at Cash Converters said it was an antique.”

Don't even trust your own father. Some thanks I get for raising you. You think I'd come to your place of work and put you in that position? You think me so cheap? Well, go on, search my stuff. You'll find nothing. I'll bet money on it.

The lying git. Truly, the man had no shame. But even this information held a ray of hope for my father—he had chosen to give the silver swan to someone in need. It was a criminal act, but not a selfish one, and somehow that made it easier to forgive. But why was I always so keen to forgive him, this put-upon sneak, this worming pariah? In that moment I realized I still loved my father, even if I didn't always like him.

—

Now our northern friend is urging me to crack on. No time, he says, no time. All right, Dave, but there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy.

At midday on Monday I waited at the Camden Town Tube station for the quiet dark-eyed girl. There was a knot in my intestines the size of a cantaloupe. Strange to say it, but I was more nervous at this moment than I had been in the holding cell, awaiting my fate, arguing with Ramilov about who would take the blame.
I will. No, I will.
It meant almost nothing that she had agreed, on her day off, to come to the park with me. Almost nothing, but not quite. Days off were rare and sacred occasions, particularly since Ramilov's detainment. She could have given me a thousand excuses for not being there. But she had said yes, and I could not imagine that had anything to do with the scenery.

The escalator brought her toward me, no silver dress this time,
no halo, but beautiful all the same, that long river of black hair released, flowing free once more. I saw her long before she saw me. As she got closer I pretended not to recognize her, looking through her as if she were just another girl, but the act soon fell apart, much to my relief. Outside, sunlight poured into the streets below. It fell onto us, illuminating our tired faces, washing away the shadows. Yes, more metaphor if you want it. Baptism, renewal, divine love: take your pick. What struck me was that, for the first time in six months, I remembered there were other kinds of heat besides the stove.

She was holding out the book I had lent her,
The Waste Land
.

“Thanks for this,” she said. “He gets the loneliness in the city right, doesn't he? When he stops poncing about in German.”

So she was lonely in the city too? I hadn't thought anything could dent her, she was so formidable to me. But I wasn't quite foolish enough to read it as a weakness admitted. That was a highly conscious reveal. She was opening something up to me.

“Do you want to see the monkeys?” I asked.

“Am I meeting the parents already?” she said.

I would call that a warm sort of insult with romantic potential.

Up Parkway and across the traffic junction, Regent's Park stretched out ahead of us, the vaguely military fences and nets of London Zoo beyond. In the world again, amid all these strangers and faces and expressions, after all those hours in the kitchen. Together, Harmony and I. Me and Harmony. For a moment, when we reached the top of the tree-lined avenue and I gestured for Harmony to follow me into the bushes, a trace of some old distrust passed across her face. Only for a second though, before she was following me through the shrubs on the path Ramilov had picked many times. There at the fence the monkeys could be seen. A wisdom of apes, a darting of exotic creatures high up in the English beeches,
their ancient faces—alive despite the Fat Men of this world—turned in curiosity toward us.

I had not given any serious thought to what I would say to her. The thought of “talking things over” I'd accepted as a pretext for getting some time alone. But the last week had not been easy. Now I could only think about the pool of clotting blood on the kitchen floor, the slow spread of darkness around The Fat Man's frame, his cold sweat against my skin, the cleaver still gripped too tightly in my fingers. I looked at Harmony and felt an overwhelming desire to confess. I had been through it all before with Sam; I could not go through it again. Both times I had lied to my parents, but for some reason I felt I could tell Harmony. She was the only person who might understand, the only one I would allow to judge me. Indeed, I felt I had to tell her: bottling these things up was not good for me.

“It didn't happen like you think, you know,” I said. And I described the figures beneath the black sheets, the house of sighs, the songbirds and the tiger. I told her about that final night, and the cell, and Ramilov hammered to the wall for his sins in an earlier act. I told her everything. She listened without a word, those dark eyes trained on mine. When I finished she remained silent. That's it, I thought. Our first date, and I've confessed grievous bodily harm. I waited for her to make excuses and move away. But she stayed where she was.

“Well, if you did it,” she said quietly, “he must have deserved it.”

“You don't understand,” I blurted. And then it all came out—Sam's last hours, the bowl of soup too far away, the tangled limbs, the thin impossible blood. The inadequacy of the second son. All the blame and uncertainty I had nurtured ever since spilled out of me in one long torrent, things I had never told a soul, that I had vowed I never would. Still she did not move away.

“You can never do enough for the people you love,” she replied at last. “You can never be enough. You can never say enough. . . .”

I looked at her.

“It took my dad weeks to die,” she went on. “I cried every night, but I never went to the hospital. Not once. We weren't close. I couldn't do all the things I should have done earlier, not then, with him barely there. That would have been worse. Sometimes you have to accept you can never do enough. . . . Then you leave that thought behind, in the past, where it belongs. And you start from where you are.”

Without another word she put her arm through mine. We stood in silence for a while and my mind was silent also, for once not trying to augur great omens from the small and humble details. Gradually conversation resumed on safer ground. Yet it was surer, as we were, for the perils encountered and survived. In the trees above us the monkeys flitted from branch to branch, with one ear out, I'd like to think, for our words. They were the first real words we spoke to each other, and those creatures were the only witnesses to this historic moment. What else we talked about is between us and them.

—

Life at The Swan started to settle. The customers returned, and the food was the best it had ever been. Confidence among the chefs was growing. Harmony had mastered larder while Dibden, to his and everyone else's surprise, had emerged as a competent, even skilled, pastry chef. It turned out that the solitude and precision of the section—and time, lots of it—had been what he needed. In the plonge, Shahram and Darik powered through the dishes, gabbling happily in their nonsense tongue. Dave, though still dense and out of tune, was proving himself a fair and just leader. Even Bob, our unmissed former tyrant, seemed to bear no ill feelings: a card arrived,
postmarked Bradford, with the message “Whoever did it, thank you.” New and wonderful produce was coming in every day: nashi pears and yuzus from Japan, pillowy buffalo mozzarellas from Campania, beautiful packages of Iberico ham. Midweek lunches were booked out and a flock of new waitresses, “an ogle,” was drafted in to cater for the growing demand.

Yet it was all a little too quiet. No coarse shouting, no obscure rap lyrics, no sudden and alarming violations. Less laughter too. Without Ramilov, things could never be quite the same. The innuendos of Camp Charles sounded hollow without his filthy laughter. Dibden had no reason to protest, the waitresses no cause to scream. All the success and happiness The Swan was enjoying carried a tinge of sadness for our fallen comrade. Often the conversation would turn to Ramilov and the outrageous things he had said or done (I made no mention of our conversation in the cells, of the girl in Leeds), then to how his case was progressing and whether he would be out soon. Each day we hoped he would return. When the yard gate squeaked open there was a collective pause in chopping and mixing, an anxious listening out for those next words. . . .

Hello, bitches, did you miss me?

I hoped to end this story with those words, but I knew better than anyone that this was not to be. The days rolled by and those words never came.

Every now and then I receive a letter from Ramilov. He has been having peculiar dreams in prison, he says. In one he is stuck in the monkey enclosure at London Zoo and Bob is his keeper, prodding him with a stick and trying to make him sing “Cage of Pure Emotion.” In another, Bob's dog, Booboo, visits him from the great beyond, dressed in a satin frock coat and walking on its hind legs. It tells him that his Parmesan tuiles are burning. Ramilov says he continues to feel awful about his sabotage of The Swan. He says it was
a selfish act that betrayed everyone close to him. It was, he says, like masturbating over the memory of a dear friend—not as much fun as you might think. We don't talk about the other stuff.